February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
British soldiers in heavily-armored personnel carriers were in position on the estate’s car parks while two lines of RUC landrovers made a “sterile zone” of the main road, down which the Orange Order was preparing to march.
Many of the traumatized people of the area were trying to come to terms with the overnight police ambush. Those at the Drumcree community center stood astonished as the sleek limousine drew to a standstill.
Into this vale of troubles stepped the elegantly-coiffed and exquisitely be-suited figure of the Comptroller of New York city, Alan Hevesi.
The man who controlled billions of dollars in New York pension fund money finest had been invited many moons previously to observe that year’s Drumcree parade. But he had not expected this.
“We were penned in by the British Army. When the Orange marchers came in from Drumcree, some young men lit up Molotov cocktails and began to lob them over the troops to land and explode on the road in the midst of the marchers,” Hevesi said an interview during his investment visit to Belfast last week.
“People, I took them to be Sinn Fein, formed a cordon, holding hands, between the kids and the soldiers, to keep the peace.
“It was a very tense, dramatic moment”, he said, smiling in a wry understatement.
There’s no understatement, however, about his meeting the following day with a group of Labor MPs at Westminster.
“I yelled at them”, he said. “I told them it was a missed opportunity, a colossal error, a terrible mistake. Their British reserve meant there was no outcry back but I think they absorbed the message”.
The episode is just one of many interventions, most of them more private, that Hevesi has made in Ireland over the past 21 years, most recently last week’s announcement of a US$6.88 million investment project in a high-tech venture-capital fund.
The money is but a fraction of the total $120 billion under Hevesi’s management in the New York State Common Retirement Fund, America’s second largest pension fund.
But the $6.88 million being invested in the Belfast-based private equity firm Crescent Capital – as part of a new